Month: October 2016

Sometimes less is more. Today I present you a way of filtering the current quarter, month and week using a single drop-down menu in Tableau. “But why would you do that if Tableau already has a date filter?”, you may ask, and the answer is in the first sentence of this paragraph.

The “relative date” filter in Tableau is very good. I use it every time and I love it. But sometimes it gives too many options, and for a specific visualization this could break things. Some dashboards are just meant to be seen by a certain date dimension.

Last week I overheard two people talking about how pie charts should never be used. One of them was showing to the other what I believe was the graph on their phone, and he stated: “There are four pie charts here and I can’t even relate them”.

From that point, I already knew: the person who created the visualization was yet another victim of the misuse of pie charts.

It’s not uncommon to see people trying to compare data using pie charts, which is one of the biggest mistakes to make since the viewer will have to work very hard to digest and translate them to useful data.